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Twenty college teams from Canada, India and across the U.S. will be at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon next week for the 14th Formula Hybrid contest, which is sort of like FIRST Robotics crossed with NASCAR.

Eight hybrid and 12 electric vehicles will need to pass numerous technical and safety inspections, and various races, for the event from April 29 through May 2.

For outside spectators, Wed. May 1 is the “most fun-filled” day to visit, according to Jessica Kinzie, the competition’s coordinating manager.  The autocross and acceleration events run from 10:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. For more information and a complete schedule, please visit the competition website.
I’ve written about this event several times, including a visit to the inaugural event in 2006 when it was hybrid-vehicle only. Here’s my story from three years ago, when electric cars were first introduced:

Electric motors are great, but they’re really pretty simple. These aren’t,” said Douglas Fraser, director of the annual Formula Hybrid race car competition at New Hampshire International Speedway, as the three-day even wound up late last week.

“Are you going to run in series? Parallel? How are they paralleled? Are you using chains? A jackshaft? Decisions about clutches, wheel motors – there’s an amazing assortment of stuff,” said Fraser, a senior research engineer at Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering, which created the Formula Hybrid contest in 2006. “No two cars are even remotely similar.”

You don’t have to tell the home team that it’s complicated. The car from the Thayer School never made it onto the track for the final endurance test after problems forced the team to face the engineering nightmare of a complete teardown and rebuild under extreme time pressure.

“We ditched the design, ditched the motor, rewired everything. . . . I made the decision at about 9 a.m. today,” said Margaux LeBlanc of Kennebunk, Maine, a fifth-year student at Thayer getting a second engineering degree, as she watched Dartmouth team members work on the car about 2 p.m., an hour before the track closed. “It’s amazing what you can do when you work really hard.”

Formula Hybrid was created in 2006 as a spinoff of the 35-year-old Formula SAE competition, which was created by the Society of Automotive Engineers (hence SAE) to give engineering undergraduates some hands-on experience of creating a working racecar – roughly half the size of a real Formula-style car – and putting it through a variety of paces.

Formula Hybrid is the same idea, except the cars are supposed to use a mix of gasoline- and electric-powered engines. Electric-only vehicles are allowed if necessary, although they’re known as “hybrid in progress,” as if they were the larval stage of the real creation.

This year’s event ran from May 2 to 5, occupying most of the interior of the speedway for the week.

Hybrid cars were still relatively novel in 2006, which is part of the reason why the event was started. And while hybrids have become a routine part of life – this reporter’s hybrid recently passed the 210,000-mile mark – actually building them remains far from routine.

“It’s the most challenging of the formula designs. Getting the two systems integrated – that’s hard,” said Zach Ketner, a senior at Lawrence Technical University, near Detroit. (As you might suspect, Michigan schools are very interested in Formula Hybrid, and Ketner said he chose to attend Lawrence after learning that it participated in Formula Hybrid. Ford, GM and Chrysler all had displays at the event to help them recruit participants. )

“There’s a challenging set of rules,” said Ketner. “Most of them are designed for safety – when things shut off, you have to make sure they shut off in a certain order and over a certain time period. (There are) decisions about whether you do things through software or hardware, there are the high-voltage and low-voltage systems. . . . There’s a lot.”

Formula Hybrid’s appeal can be seen in its international appeal. Two colleges from Canada participated, as did four colleges from India (whose students looked slightly shocked by the weather during what Fraser said was the coldest and wettest of the 10 Formula Hybrid contests), as well as one from Turkey.

That team, from Atilim University in the capital city of Ankara, made the last endurance run of the contest, cheering frantically from behind the concrete safety barriers as their car zipped under the checkered flag after multiple trips around the one-mile oval. Yet, it almost didn’t happen.

“We had it ready in Ankara, but here the inspector told us the wiring was not good,” said Ayca Gocmen Glingor, a graduate student in automotive engineering who accompanied the undergraduate team. “We had to change it, then they said it was (allowed) and then we went back to our original.”

All’s well that end’s well, however, particularly because some last-minute running around meant that a vital piece of equipment was included on the car.

“Go-Pro! Go-Pro!” shouted one team member, using the name for the ubiquitous sports camera. These days, if your accomplishment isn’t filmed, it hardly exists.

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